What would be the point? Anybody with half a brain would see an item in a "shop", then say to themselves "better check and see if it's cheaper on the AH". So why not just cut a step out and put it on the AH. Also, nobody in WoW goes "i have gold I wonder what I can buy". They go to the AH to buy a specific item. Do you realize how much of a pain in the ass it would be to find a specific item in a sea of personal shops? You'd need some sort of interface for searching for specific items you were looking for and comparing prices to get the best deal (like a server-wide auction house). *cough*.

What would be the point? Anybody with half a brain would see an item in a "shop", then say to themselves "better check and see if it's cheaper on the AH". So why not just cut a step out and put it on the AH. Also, nobody in WoW goes "i have gold I wonder what I can buy". They go to the AH to buy a specific item. Do you realize how much of a pain in the ass it would be to find a specific item in a sea of personal shops? You'd need some sort of interface for searching for specific items you were looking for and comparing prices to get the best deal (like a server-wide auction house). *cough*.

Again they'd need an incredibly complex filtering interface for it work.

---------- Post added 2013-02-04 at 01:34 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Mr Hoppins

In short, yes.

But able to set up shop anywhere and no AH tax/posting fee.

Really cause I thought we were talking about a phased shop not pitching a tent where ever please?

This used to be the only way to buy/sell stuff in Lineage 2. People sat around in the busiest cities nearly on top of each other right by the teleportal NPCs. It was a confusing mess with crazy lag and horribly inefficient. When I finally came to WoW in vanilla having the AH was a such a relief.

What if you had an item in your bag that allowed you to place the stand anywhere for a short period of time? With a CD?

Then allow the item to have a limit of the amount of items you could have on display, you would have to be at your stand the whole time, it would create almost a Bazaar like feature. I think it might even create a better sense within the community of who is actually selling what.

It sounds nice in theory, but it would be too much work for people to pour though endless characters shops to find deals, when they can just go to the AH, find people undercutting, and buy cheaply from there.

Really, what would you hope to see there, that would not be better handled by the AH?

You could argue that the AH has no soul, and as it stands no community building in it at all. Perhaps the innovation that it once held no longer holds sway to empower people within a server to get to know who has what etc... It is efficient and it should still be kept for that reason perhaps. But I feel the purpose of anything in the game should be to empower the community at large (this is an MMO afterall).

The point about 'shops' for transmog items and other specialty items makes sense. In fact, a 'modified' shop system would be useful for any items that are sold over a period longer than the maximum AH post time: transmog gear, pets, seasonal items (eg. snowballs), low level gear, low level profession mats, old world quest items (aldor/scryer turn ins), etc.

Instead of implementing a 'stand anywhere' shop, it could be built into the auction house as a separate pane. Sellers would purchase 'slots' (like guild bank tabs) for a one time fee and can post their items indefinitely (as long as you're subscribed) with no bidding and for no deposit but sales would incur an increased auction house cut. Shops can be categorized and named, allowing players to search for a specific shop. Items found in these shops would still be searchable through the standard auction house interface.

In my mind, the entire point of a new shop system for specialty items is to allow players to sell transmog gear without having to individually price their items every 48h and paying the brutal deposit. This allows for an increased volume of 'specialty' items on the AH. The increased AH commission is to offset this change.

For this implementation, a small fee for 10 slots and 50K total for 100 slots with a 25% AH cut sounds reasonable.

While this is nice idea to place your shop and advertise items in it it won't work. Here is why.

If I have 1-5 even 10 items to sell its ok. I will not spamm and/or my shop will look nice to eye.
If I have like 500-1k up to 2k items to sell I'm either spamming chat (imagine how long it will take to advertise even 500 items with 2-3s intervals) and/or my shop looks like a big pile of junk.

Like I said idea is nice but it will not work in a game like WoW because many of us are selling lots of stuff everyday.

I will say no. A waste of a) develpoers time b)develpers money aka our money. c)Waste of space - everyone and there brother would have a shop in the citys, would look so stupid. d) spam - There would be so much spam, i tried other games who had it, and was so much spam in trade chat, since that is the way advertismen works.

Fine i get it, it would work instant, but that is why most things have a "buy now" , very few thing is Bid only. But the AH works just as well, if not better, since if i need lets say a epic mail head, now i can go to AH, see if there is one and buy it, OR i may have to bid for it. wuuptido, then i would have to watch spam chat, or go look at every singel personal shop there is. HOW is that better?
More problems / harder to find stuff, More spam, would look stupid

Though to be able to sell my rare xmog gear from collecting from the world to Blacksmithing... It'd be lovely to have a shop of sorts. Positive rep would be a bonus to have peeps come by your shop. The amount of resources this would need would be very taxing. On their art team, on their tech support and their servers.

I will say no. A waste of a) develpoers time b)develpers money aka our money. c)Waste of space - everyone and there brother would have a shop in the citys, would look so stupid. d) spam - There would be so much spam, i tried other games who had it, and was so much spam in trade chat, since that is the way advertismen works.

Fine i get it, it would work instant, but that is why most things have a "buy now" , very few thing is Bid only. But the AH works just as well, if not better, since if i need lets say a epic mail head, now i can go to AH, see if there is one and buy it, OR i may have to bid for it. wuuptido, then i would have to watch spam chat, or go look at every singel personal shop there is. HOW is that better?
More problems / harder to find stuff, More spam, would look stupid

People already spam trade chat saying they are trying to either sell something in the AH for x price, or sell something not in the AH and pst them. There is a reason why people do this, it's because there is SO much stuff in the AH sometimes on some servers that is quite impossible to find anything at all if you don't know exactly what you are looking for.

One of the other reasons is that there was a time when you went to the forums to see who actually had what patterns so that you could craft x item, now there seems to be an argument that the AH is not the same thing it used to be or you wouldn't have these ideas in the first place.

Marketplace would be neat but, things are too firmly established around the auction house to ever have a chance of success. You can always use trade for its intended purpose of listing things for sale or trade.